Bound By Honor (1993)

April 30, 1993

Review/Film;
The Chicano Experience, in Its Glory and Tedium

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: April 30, 1993

"Bound by Honor," Taylor Hackford's ambitious melodrama about the Chicano experience in and around East Los Angeles, is like one of those huge wall murals that give bold, defiant color to an urban landscape that otherwise looks passive and drab. The film is big and long (nearly three hours), passionate and flat. It's full of heroic and tragic incident, but skimpy about the details of quotidian lives. Though it's not the epic it means to be, it is not a failure.

"Bound by Honor" is the story of 12 crucial years in the formation of three young men: Paco (Benjamin Bratt), who seems to have been born angry; his half-brother, Cruz (Jesse Borrego), who has the talent and temperament of an artist, and Paco's cousin Miklo (Damian Chapa), whose father is Anglo and mother is Mexican-American, a fact that determines the direction of his life.

With his light skin, sandy hair and blue eyes, Miklo grows up always having to certify his claim to be a member of the macho Chicano brotherhood. Of the three young men, he becomes the most furious and fanatical, the one with the most obsessed vision. Paco, a seeming loose cannon with a hair-trigger temper, goes through an off-screen conversion of character while serving a hitch in the United States Marines. By the middle of the film, he is a police detective and, it seems, a good one, patiently negotiating his way between his own minority culture and that of the dominant white society. Cruz's early success as a painter is nearly wrecked by his addiction to drugs.

This is the barest outline of the screenplay, which was written by Jimmy Santiago Baca, the New Mexico-born poet, after earlier versions had been written by Floyd Mutrux and then by Jeremy Iacone, from a story by Ross Thomas. The film's title was not idly chosen. "Bound by Honor" is almost exclusively concerned with each of the three friends' sense of his own identity in a perilous environment in which the hostile forces are whites, blacks and other Chicanos.

The initial impulse is to compare "Bound by Honor" to Luchino Visconti's epic "Rocco and His Brothers." Yet "Bound by Honor" is no great family saga set in a time of overwhelming social, political and economic change. "Bound by Honor" is an action melodrama with a social conscience.

Miklo, Paco and Cruz are characters whose rich potential is severely limited by the circumstances in which their stories are played out: gang fights and beatings, car chases and shootouts, sit-downs and reconciliations, in East Los Angeles and in San Quentin prison, where Miklo effectively grows up. Much of the film is riveting, especially the San Quentin sequences actually shot inside the prison. "Bound by Honor" takes on real heft as it follows Miklo's cool, brutal rise through the prison's Chicano power structure to become a figure of dark political importance.

Yet a lot is missing. Miklo, Paco and Cruz are defined almost entirely in the terms in which they choose to present themselves to their peers. They are all swagger, intimidation and attitude. It's as if they had no private moments, to say nothing of private lives.

With the exception of a sequence involving the accidental death of Paco's and Cruz's younger brother, the film pays little attention to their families. The movie sees virtually nothing of how these Chicanos earn their livings, eat, sleep and make love. Only Cruz is seen to have a girlfriend, and then only briefly. Paco and Miklo would appear to be celibate. "Bound by Honor" presents their lives as an unending succession of moments of high melodrama.

If there were a greater urgency to the melodrama, the mind might not have time to wander, and to wonder about everything that is not seen. The movie's narrative is full of twists and turns, some of which remain undramatized (like Paco's reformation), without gathering momentum until near the end. Even the film's time frame seems arbitrary.

The story begins in 1972. Succeeding sequences are identified as taking place in 1973, 1980, 1983 and 1984. The significance of these dates remains unexplained, either by the film or by anything the moviegoer can bring to it. A lot was going on outside East Los Angeles and San Quentin in that period. Yet nothing the audience sees in the film has any particular relation to the end of the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Nixon era or the beginning of the Reagan years. If this is the film's point, it's an unilluminating one.

Mr. Hackford has cast the film well. Though they must play at a fever pitch most of the time, Mr. Chapa, Mr. Bratt and Mr. Borrego are excellent, as are the members of the large supporting cast, notably Enrique Castillo, who appears as the leader of San Quentin's Chicanos, and Lanny Flaherty, as the San Quentin con who makes an unfortunate bargain with Miklo.

"Bound by Honor" looks and sounds authentic but, like many community wall paintings, it has the manner less of one artist's vision than of a community endeavor. This may explain its singular shortcomings and its redeeming sincerity.